Producer and genre-melting songwriter Christopher Hatfield fifth Love Axe’s album, Optimism Paranoia Desperation Abolition was released on June 19th. Love Axe’s early releases (Phenomenomenons, 2011, and South Dakota, 2015) were peppered with indie rock and power pop influences, The Food (2021) was a sort of funky, Prince-meets-Weezer album, while the instrumental Linear Valley (2022) was dominated by futuristic synths. The new album is something more intimate: a softly strummed nylon-string guitar and carefully placed adornments (clarinet, piano, pedal steel, some bass and drums here and there) lead the way, making room for Hatfield’s baritone to be front and center, allowing his wary words to wash over listeners with the kind of vulnerability heard on records by Bill Callahan, David Berman, and Nick Drake. “I wrote this record as a way of processing and grieving all of the terrible things I learned about what humanity and this country are capable of during the first Trump administration. And I could only really do that because it was over with – I don’t think you’re really able to process trauma and grief without the benefit of time or psychological distance,” Hatifield said. But it’s 2025, and here we are, once again, in the clutches of fascist billionaires, hellbent on revenge and destroying the planet. Hatifeld continues, “So this now feels, very sadly, much more relevant to our world than it did when I finished it.” OPDA is a record that is delivered in four parts: quite literally, it considers the trajectory from optimism to paranoia to desperation to abolition.

What He Says: “When I wrote this I was thinking at first about the then-recent invasion of Ukraine, and then my mind started wandering to other imperialist projects and their proponents, from Zionism to grotesques like Elon Musk, to the United States and white supremacy. This song is about dominance and control and how much the side with the so-called upper hand eventually loses in pursuit of maintaining its status, and so it’s also an exploration of certain kinds of relationships and how one can end up internalizing the language of their oppressor (“This whole planet’s built for you / and the solar system, too / you’re a black hole, not a singularity”). I was really thrilled that my former bandmate in Those Transatlantics, Kathleen Bracken, was game for singing along with me for the first time in nearly twenty years, and we’re joined by regular Love Axe contributors Todd Boepple (Odd Opal) on bass guitar, and Kevin Boggs (Fashion Bath) on drums.” 

“This song started out with the full rock and roll treatment, with electric guitars and loud drums and all kinds of things that got gradually stripped away as its nature revealed itself to me. I think this is the fifth attempt I made at recording this from scratch, and though it’s definitely the slowest and quietest version it’s also much more dramatic and raw than how it started. The whole endeavor is made several orders of magnitude better by the presence of the obscenely talented Nashville artist Lauren Balthrop, whose own records I cannot recommend enough.” 

His Mixtape:

Elois Scott – Broadway Love

As far as I can tell this is the only recording Elois Scott ever released, and while I haven’t looked terribly hard, there doesn’t seem to be much information out there about her or her musical career. This song might really be all there is, which makes the fact that it managed to find its way onto the internet all the more astonishing. Is this the platonic ideal of a snare drum sound?  Imagine making something so heavy, crispy, and in the pocket, then dematerializing back into the ether – still a better discography than most of us could manage with all the time in the world.

Durand Jones and the Indications – Listen To Your Heart

My wife Joelle and I first heard this on a local radio station a couple of New Year’s Eves ago, and we had to sit in the car, dumbfounded, until it was finished playing. The production is so spot on, I thought it was an old song! Turns out that these guys have actually had quite a following for several years already, and even though it’s exactly the kind of music I’d love to listen to for every one of my remaining days on earth, not a single one of my friends ever thought to mention them to me. I mean, who puts a french horn solo in a song like this? What I’m trying to say is that I should probably get new friends. 

Jerry Reed – Lord, Mr. Ford

This anti-automobile anthem was written by a trans woman named Deena Kaye Rose, and was the only single from the album of the same name by Jerry Reed, released in 1973. I’d say two out of my favorite top twenty things are a) despairing of the social and environmental damage a century of American car culture has wrought upon the planet, and b) Jerry Reed, so this song is particularly relevant to my interests. It doesn’t hurt that the rest of the album it’s on goes extra hard, especially the next track, which is a nasty as hell cover of Folsom Prison Blues. Now, does a) stop me from enjoying b) in the Smokey And The Bandit trilogy? That’s a negative, good buddy.

Emily Nenni – Useless

On The Ranch is my favorite country album of the 2020s, and this is my favorite tune on that record. I just love Emily Nenni’s voice and delivery on this one, and her band (also known as Teddy & the Rough Riders) is top notch. To me songwriting is a very difficult endeavor that gets harder to do with each passing year, so I love hearing and watching artists who can make it seem so effortless and fun. I don’t know if it’s actually that way for these people but it sure makes me happy to imagine so. These cats tour all the time so PLEASE make the effort to go see them when they’re nearby – the last time they came to my town, they had a ringer of a pedal steel player whose name is Muskrat Jones, and I am giving you my personal guarantee* that you will not regret buying a ticket or a record. 

*Refunds only available at the original point of sale

Eddie Floyd – We Can Love

This is from the incredible compilation of Stax Records songwriter demos that was released in 2023, which has an excellent companion in the Soulsville U.S.A. documentary that came out in 2024. There are 146 tracks in total, and it’s just a total goldmine for anybody with the inclination to check it out. The joy and awe of discovery I feel digging into these songs can only be dwarfed by what it must have felt like to dust off and play some of these recordings for the very first time in decades, and I think I could live a whole life inside this one compilation. This one by Eddie Floyd is the perfect reminder that a great song needs nothing in the way of fancy recording equipment, time signatures, or conceptual underpinnings – just a good idea, brilliantly executed.

Cameron McGill & What Army – Counterfeit

Speaking of brilliantly-executed good ideas, I’m often telling pretty much everybody who will listen, including my friend Cameron, that his song Counterfeit is one of the finest songs ever written and recorded by pretty much anybody and I will keep telling them that until this becomes accepted fact across space and time. I just love everything about this, from the lines “the evening folds back like a matchbook” and “if you wonder what people are hungry for, you’ll starve your whole life trying to feed them all” to the thrilling string arrangement (my god, the ending). There is not, ironically, a false moment in any of this song’s four minutes and fifty seconds. And it might not even be Cameron’s best one.

Kathleen Edwards – Hard On Everyone

This feels like the kind of song you only get to write after having written a thousand others. It remains personally idiomatic and yet instantly catchy and memorable, and each time I listen it brings me to the same feelings I had the very first time – not an easy thing to do! Though it came out in 2020, I didn’t discover it until a couple of years later, and then I listened to it every day for months. I’m so happy Kathleen Edwards has returned to recording and touring to bless us with gifts like this one.

 

Big Mess – Things Happen

A band with five people and two last names reunites ten years after their last record and makes one of the best albums of 2024. My dear friends Scott and Brad Allen got back together with the brothers Carden (Pat, Mike, and Rob) at the famous Our Leisure Studios in Livonia, Michigan and made a consistently surprising and beautiful batch of songs, with this one being among my favorites. I love a song that doesn’t linger a single moment longer than it needs to, and by the time Scott sings “SHIT HAPPENS” you’re ready to flip a table over right along with him but it’s already over, and you’re restarting the track trying to figure out how you got there from the strings-and-piano intro. At least that’s what always happens to me.

Optimism Paranoia Desperation Abolition is out now. Look HERE for more information on Love Axe.